The 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has drastically changed people’s lifestyles and forced them to adopt new behaviors. To assess Italians’ reported compliance to the behavioral provisions issued by the Italian Ministry of Health against the COVID-19 pandemic and identify the socio-demographic and psychological profile of a person who is more likely to comply with them, we conducted a quantitative study with 1556 participants. Notably, in Italy, after a month of lockdown, the reported compliance with anti-COVID prescriptions was high overall. Moreover, personality traits, risk perception, well-being levels, and emotional activations appeared to play a role in promoting or hindering people’s reported compliance. These findings emphasize the importance of being aware of the reported compliance’s antecedents for defining advanced pro-compliance policies and messages and thus better manage each stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and, plausibly, in other countries.

Together with vaccines, contact tracing systems (CTS) have proved to be one of the best strategies to deal with the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, the adoption of such systems has been quite limited in EU countries, and Italy was no exception. The present research aimed to investigate the factors drawn from the most relevant psychological models in the literature, most associated with the adoption of CTS. The data analysis of the 501 surveyed answers (329 from CTS adopters) showed that knowing important others who have downloaded the CTS, CTS attitudes, CTS perceived efficacy, COVID-19 risk perception, and trust in the government and its actions influenced the adoption of the Italian CTS (52% of explained variance). These factors defined a new specific model that can be used to more effectively promote CTS adoption and thus increase the protective potential of these technologies, whose effectiveness is inevitably linked to adoption.

Reputational systems promote pro-social behaviors, also in virtual environments, therefore their study contributes to the knowledge of social interactions. Literature findings emphasize the power of reputation in fostering fairness in many circumstances, even when its influence is not directly oriented towards specific individuals. The present study contributes to the investigation of the psychological antecedents of fairness, introducing (or not) reputation in the social dilemma framework. Although reputational systems usually influence fairness dynamics, there are also socio-psychological characteristics that can play a role, affecting the adhesion to the norm online. To investigate their effects, we employed a virtual bargaining game that could include a reputational system depending on the experimental condition. Results show that the participant’s fairness could be significantly influenced by socio-psychological and demographic characteristics, as well as personality traits. Reputation seems to decrease fairness in those individuals who report high levels of Neuroticism and Openness. At the same time, high values of Self-Efficacy appear to be more likely associated with unfair behaviors when reputation is off the bargaining. Finally, Age and Sense of Community emerge as fairness promoters regardless of the experimental condition.

We examined the level of muscular tension of mentalis muscle of 36 students in graphic design at rest and during the presentation of three slides reproducing facial expressions. Analysis showed an increase in the myographic level of mentalis muscle from the third second of measurement onwards after the presentation of the slide in which contraction of the chin was involved. We interpret this result by hypothesizing that the decodification of some facial expressions is realized through a microreproduction of the stimulus from the decodifying subject.

Orthorexia nervosa (ON) is characterized by an intense avoidance of foods considered unhealthy, obsession with healthy eating behaviors, and pathological fixation on healthy foods. Although there are still debates in the literature about the psychological factors and symptoms of ON, it should be noted that many of the symptoms share common features with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between ON and OCD with its subtypes. In this framework, the cross-sectional study was conducted with an opportunistic sample of 587 participants (86% women and 14% men), with an average age of 29.32 (s.d. = 11.29; age range = 15–74). Our work showed that almost all OCD subtypes were largely correlated with ON. The lowest correlation was for “Checking” and the highest for “Obsession”. Overall, the OCD subtypes (i.e., Indecisiveness, Just Right, Obsession, and Hoarding) were more strongly associated with ON measures, while subtypes Checking and Contamination, although positively associated, had lower correlation coefficients.